January 1, Trump Slams Arkansas Senator Over Daylight Saving Time Standoff

Wyatt’s Take

• Trump wants the Senate to stop the twice-a-year clock madness and give Americans more evening light year-round.
• Tom Cotton is blocking the bill, claiming it would send Western kids to school in the dark.
• With midterms and other big votes coming, the clock change fight risks getting buried in Washington again.

The fight over daylight saving time just got personal at the highest levels of the Republican Party. President Trump took to Truth Social over the weekend to call out one of his own allies for standing in the way of permanent daylight saving time.

Trump urged the people of Arkansas to pressure their senator, Tom Cotton, to back the Sunshine Protection Act that already sailed through the House with broad support. He called it a “GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself.”

“Almost everybody wants ‘The Sunshine Protection Act’ to pass, except for Tom Cotton,” Trump said. “To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself.”

Cotton fired back on X, reminding folks that Congress tried year-round daylight saving time in the 1970s and quickly reversed course after parents complained their kids were waiting for the school bus in pitch darkness during winter months.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Saving Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton said on X. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.”

The divide is less about party lines and more about geography. Coastal lawmakers see longer evenings as a win for families and golf courses, while senators from mountain and Western states worry about children heading to school before sunrise in the dead of winter.

Senator Steve Daines of Montana put it plainly when he said the plan works fine for Florida tee times but not for parents in Western states where the sun would not rise until 9:30 in the morning.

“I can see where Florida likes it for tee times at certain times of the year, but it doesn’t work so well for moms and dads putting kids on buses when the sunrise in Western Montana wouldn’t be till 9:30 in the morning. It’s not going to work for us,” Daines told CNN in July.

Senate leaders admit the issue is not a simple yes-or-no vote because the impact varies sharply from state to state. With the National Defense Authorization Act, war funding, and government spending fights already crowding the calendar after the midterms, the daylight saving bill risks being pushed aside once again.

Wyatt Matters

Middle America families just want their evenings back and their kids safely on the school bus in daylight, not stuck in endless Washington gridlock over something most folks already agree needs fixing.